Many companies have done away with the mindset of having separate marketing and sales funnels. Instead, they’ve turned to a single opportunity pipeline, one where sales and marketing work shoulder-to-shoulder to continually engage prospects as they move through the buyer’s journey. If you’ve committed to this type of approach, then it’s critical that sales and marketing work in unison and focus on better data integration for better digital marketing.
The Interdependent Relationship Between Sales and Marketing
Alignment between marketing and sales is critical. It helps improve the buyer-seller relationship. It gives gravitas to new offers, discounts and incentives. It allows marketing to time those offers while helping them to improve how different buyer personas are engaged and incentivized. Ultimately, all your digital marketing strategies will improve if you focus on a strategy of shared information and shared data.
Your inbound marketing strategy works in real-time. As such, it must have a data and market intelligence gathering strategy that works in real-time. The focus is to match the speed of your business, anticipate future customer needs, better define buyer personas and then match the digital strategies that work best to those personas.
One Centralized Data Integration Location
Companies that can match the data from the field with the data online are always one-step ahead of competitors. Instead of operating in data silos, these companies have a symbiotic relationship between marketing and sales.
When salespeople visit customers, attend trade shows, or handle incoming calls, that data and information is immediately captured. The digital marketing team can then leverage that data to improve their message. Taking this a step further, marketing can provide sales with data from the company’s inbound marketing strategy that further helps them in penetrating new customer accounts. The information that both, marketing and sales have is invaluable to each department and to the other – the departments must work as one to gain the greatest benefits possible. The solution lies in a centralized data location.
It's time to eliminate the mindset that allows these business development departments to operate apart from one another. Your digital marketing strategies can only carry your company so far. Your sales team can only be so effective. Each has data the other needs. Combining these two departments as part of your business development initiatives will dramatically improve your ability to defend and grow your market share.
Expanding Your Data Sources Within Your Information Gathering Strategy
It’s not merely about the data gathered by sales or the data accumulated by marketing. It’s ultimately about expanding your data sources and improving your information gathering techniques. Each customer interaction – be it online, in person or on the phones – must be followed up with a summary of data gathered. Data must also be captured through every online resource. That means initiating data collection through email marketing, digital advertisements, mobile marketing, SMS (text-based) marketing, content marketing and social media, while also extrapolating data analytics from each landing page and from your website overall.
Your inbound marketing strategy and outbound customer data must be synchronized. Success means you’ll be able to reduce costs and improve how and when you engage your audience.
Do you need a single opportunity funnel that requires a centralized data integration location? We can help. Contact us .
Written By: David Carpenter
